Last Friday, EASEUS established free giveaway cooperation with MakeTechEasier.com, allowing 24-hour unlimited free download of EASEUS Partition Master Professional Edition full version. MakeTechEasier.com posted an announcement of this activity on their homepage and many other big sites like LifeHacker, DownloadSquad, DSLReports, eeeuser, etc. reshipped this giveaway event.

During the first two hours of this event, there came hundreds of thousands downloads of the full version of EASEUS Partition Master Professional Edition. There were 38,000 clicks on MakeTechEasier and more than 50,000 on LifeHacker. Too many downloads caused host crash of EASEUS website. Then the giveaway activity was forced to stop and users from various sites cannot download EASEUS Partition Master Professional Edition any more. 24-hour unlimited downloads only kept 2 hours.

Below is the original email from hosting:

“The server has crashed as a result of this morning’s high volume of traffic that is coming into your Web site. It looks like over 50,000 downloads have been made.”

And now, we are trying to solve this kind of issue to ensure that there will be no such problems for the next giveaway activity. We are extremely sorry for the giveaway failure this time. Here, EASEUS may provide another 24-hour free download of EASEUS Partition Master Professional Edition full version once we solve this problem.

If you are still interested in downloading EASEUS Partition Master, please visit http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm to download the Home Edition which is free to home users. This product has just a little difference with EASEUS Partition Master Professional Edition. You may check the differences at http://www.partition-tool.com/easeus-partition-manager/comparison.html.

Here at MakeTechEasier, I hope to take the opportunity to explain what really happened behind the scene.

– The free download news was first released last Friday, 27th Feb 2008, 12am (Eastern Time).

– All went well for the first half of the day. At about 11am, major sites like DownloadSquad and Lifehacker started to pick up the news and sent tons of traffice to MTE. The download site at EASEUS couldn’t take the load and went down. Soon after, MTE’s server also went down due to the tons of response and comments.

– After three hours (about 2pm, Eastern time) and countless of email exchange with the web host, MTE was reinstated and the download page was up and running again. However, EASEUS never recovered.

– Plenty of comments started to flood the download page. I tried to contact the developer, but to no avail. It seems that they were busy fighting the fire on their end.

– At 9pm (Eastern time), I received the reply from the developer that the site (and the link) was down, but they have fixed it and everything is back to normal. They also said that the download will be extended for another 24 hours. Upon receiving this news, I announced through the comments that the download will be extended. My first mistake – I should have checked the link before posting the comments. The link was not working as promised, and this resulted in another floodgate of comments.

– I removed the link from the download page at 10pm. I emailed the developer again, requesting them to fix the link.

– Once again, there was no response from them.

– The next day, I took the liberty to host the file on a private server and provide free download for a short limited period of time (something I shouldn’t have done due to rights infringement). The download was make available for another 15 hours, but only to those who left a comment or have contacted me via the contact form.

– Two days later, I received an email from the developer explaining the story on their side. They also informed me that they will be releasing a public apology, and that is what you see at Send2press.com now.

This was the whole incident.

We didn’t plan to fail, but sometimes, things just doesn’t turn out the way you want it to be.

For those who have spend countless of hours trying to download the file and ended up with nothing, we would like to apologize for this unhappy event. On the other hand, I would also like to express my appreciation to those who have shown support to this event and stood by us all the way. We would not be what we are today if not for your support.

At the moment, I am still in discussion with the EASEUS developers to provide another round of free download for MTE readers. Nothing is confirmed yet, at least until both MTE and EASEUS have sufficiently prepared our server for the traffic spike. Rest assure we won’t make the same mistake again.